as Miami the
huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a
short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the
shoulder, is vividly before me as I write. The piece in question was, I
recall, from the pen of Mr. Bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--he
was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch
as he now appears to me to have supplied Mr. Brougham, of the Lyceum
aforesaid, with his choicest productions.

I sit again at London Assurance, with Mrs. Wallack--"Fanny" Wallack, I
think, not that I quite know who she was--as Lady Gay Spanker, flushed
and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and
afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; I am present also
at Love in a Maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art I
fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which I admired
for the first time Mrs. Russell, afterwards long before the public as
Mrs. Hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the
low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. There are pieces of that
general association, I admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama
of modern life and of French origin--though what was then not of French
origin?--in which Miss Julia Bennett, fresh from triumphs at the
Haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet,
either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of
licentious design, I forget which, though with a sense somehow that the
white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the
adventuress; Miss Julia Bennett with whom at a later age one was to
renew acquaintance as the artful and ample Mrs. Barrow, full of manner
and presence and often Edwin Booth's Portia, Desdemona and Julie de
Mortemer. I figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to Miss
Laura Keene at Wallack's on the secession thence of this original
charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly
present to me, with the relish expressed for that "English" sweetness of
her speech (I already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be English) which was
not as the speech mostly known to us. The Uncles, within my hearing,
even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which I
strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as Mrs. Chillington in the
refined comedietta of A Morning Call, where she made delightful game of
Mr. Lester as Sir Edward Arde